Teaching Literature to Hearing Impaired Students: Technology Assisted Learning

Bilingualism is taught to the hearing impaired to equip them to face the challenges when they leave school. This is in tandem with the aspirations of the society, everyone is equal and must be given equal opportunity. As such, the hearing impaired are given the equal opportunity to acquire English as a second language. Unfortunately, their inherent problem, language acquisition, poses a tremendous challenge in learning English. Cummins (1984) articulates how learners draw on one language to acquire another, in the caseof hearing impaired students, it is a complex, confusing process. Learning English itself is difficult, what more in understanding English literature. The irony is literature is a compulsory component in public examinations. The researecher was faced with students who were really struggling to understand the novels they have to master in order to pass the English examinations. The purpose of the present study was to narrow the gap between theory and practice and to describe the teaching and learning strategy used by the researcher in one integrated programme in a secondary school. The researcher fully utilised the computer to help the students understand literature and the findings suggest that computer/technology assisted instrutions help to increase students understanding of literature and helps them to score better in examinations.